Armistice Page 12

  “Molotov, of course. Malenkov. Bulganin.” After a moment, Kennan added another name: “Maybe Khrushchev, too.”

  “Never heard of him,” Truman admitted.

  “He’s an up-and-comer. Ran the Ukraine. Was a political commissar at the battle of Stalingrad. Nye kultyurny, the Russians say—uncultured. Playing the peasant buffoon may have kept him alive while Stalin was slaughtering anyone who seemed halfway clever. He’s short and squat, with a bullet head and warts. But you don’t want to get in his way, or he’ll bulldoze you.”

  “I’ll remember him, then,” Truman said. “But for now, it’s Beria.” He laughed in lieu of banging his head against the wall. “Aren’t we lucky?”

  “Now that you mention it, sir,” Kennan replied, “no.”

  —

  Vasili Yasevich didn’t mind Poland. It put him in mind of what the Soviet Union would have looked like if it were cleaner and the people worked harder. True, the part where he was had been fought over more than once in the last war. Not all the damage had been repaired, and now this new uprising was wrecking what had been. But nothing in Smidovich compared to the houses and churches and farms he saw here.

  Some of the guys in his squad had come this way before. One middle-aged fellow named Yuri, whose smile showed a mouthful of gold teeth, started laughing when he trudged past a Catholic church. “What’s so funny?” Vasili asked.

  “Last time I was here, back in ’44, I got shot right in the ass,” Yuri answered. “They lugged me in there, laid me on a pew on my belly, and patched me up. I bet my blood’s still on the wood. Shit, I spilled enough of it. I was out of action for a couple of weeks. Then they plugged me back in like a goddamn lamp.”

  “Maybe we won’t have to fight too much longer, now that things are different.” Vasili had learned to talk around Stalin’s death. Too many men got upset if you spoke about it too openly. It was as if they’d lost their own fathers, not the tyrant who’d sent them out to get killed.

  When his outfit got the news, he’d had to fake sobbing and wailing to keep from looking like a white crow to everyone else. To him, Stalin was the monster who’d taken over from the monster named Lenin. They’d run his family out of Russia and into exile in Harbin. He had no genuine reason to be sorry Stalin wasn’t breathing any more.

  A rifle cracked up ahead. Yuri hit the dirt with a speed that spoke of lessons learned in a hard, hard school. Vasili was a split second behind him. “Watch yourself, kid,” said the man with the bankroll in his mouth. “You get shot once, you find out you sure the fuck don’t want to get shot twice. Shit on me if they’ll slap another wound dressing on my hairy ass in that church.”

  “I hear you,” Vasili said. “Where do you think that round came from?”

  “Somewhere in that apartment block,” Yuri answered, not pointing.

  Another shot rang out and snarled through the rubbish clogging the street. Sure as sure, this one came from the block of flats ahead. It was a block: uncompromisingly rectangular, the kind of place to warehouse workers and their families when they weren’t at the steel mill or the gypsum plant. He’d seen plenty of apartment blocks like that in the cities of the USSR he’d passed through on his way west. Some of the men called them Stalin Gothic. So Poland had them, too? Lucky Poland, to enjoy the benefits of Soviet civilization!

  From a different window in the same building, a machine gun spat death and mutilation down the street. Vasili rolled behind the marble staircase leading up to the church. They saw him do it. A couple of bullets smacked off the stone, but they didn’t bite him.

  Yuri joined him back there after the stream of bullets moved away. “I hate those fucking places,” he said. “They might as well be fortresses. You have to clear ’em out stair by stair, room by room, closet by closet. You go in a company, you come out a squad.”

  Someone hoisted the Polish flag, white over red, above the apartment block. In accented, oddly rhythmic Russian, a bandit shouted, “Who do you shitheads keep fighting for a dead man?”

  Because they’ll kill me if I don’t, and you may not if I do, Vasili thought. It might not be the answer the Pole wanted to hear, but it held enough truth to satisfy him.

  He knew it also wasn’t the answer the Red Army would want to hear. Instead of coming out with it, he asked Yuri, “How come we don’t knock the place flat? See how the Poles like 155s and 500-kilo bombs.”

  “I wouldn’t mind. I bet we do, in fact,” the veteran said. “But the pussies’ll keep fighting in the ruins. Fuck me if they aren’t tougher to get rid of than so many bedbugs.”

  The lieutenant in charge of the company ordered an attack on the block of flats. Some Red Army men dashed forward with cries of “Urra!”—mostly, Vasili judged, the ones too young, too stupid, or too drunk to see they didn’t have a prayer of a chance. He sat tight himself. Yuri smoked a papiros and didn’t go anywhere, either. Pretty soon, the handful of soldiers still alive let out different kinds of cries as they writhed in the streets.

  After the assault failed—maybe after he showed his own superiors the proper aggressive Soviet spirit—the lieutenant called for a bombardment. Shells slammed into the concrete walls. A good, properly manufactured product might have made them bounce off. But they bit big chunks out of the apartment block. It was built no stronger than it needed to be to keep standing. The Russians and the Poles who’d worked for them had something in common with the Chinese among whom Vasili’d grown up: they cut enough corners to make a whole new street.

  Smoke started curling up along with the dust of devastation. “Good!” Yuri said savagely. “If they roast in there, they can’t keep shooting at us.”

  “For Stalin!” the Red Army lieutenant shouted, urging his men on to another rush. “For Stalin and Beria!”

  He should have left that alone, Vasili thought. Stalin had inspired people. Vasili didn’t understand that, but couldn’t deny it. Beria, though? The only thing you wanted to do with Beria was keep him from finding out you’d ever been born. No one loved or even admired Beria.

  The lieutenant led from the front. That was always the way to get your men to follow. It was also a pretty good way to get yourself killed. Vasili shouted “For the great Stalin!” as loud as he could and ran forward to a shell hole ten meters farther up. He dove into it as if it were a cool pond on a hot summer day. “Oof!” he said when he hit—the rubble-strewn bottom was a lot harder than any swimming hole.

  A moment later, Yuri joined him. Instead of diving, the veteran slid into the crater as if he were a goat hopping off a ledge. And, a moment after he did, the machine gun sent a short, professional burst not nearly far enough over their heads.

  “So much for that,” Yuri said.

  “How much ammo does it take to kill somebody, anyway?” Vasili asked. “How did those cocksuckers live through that?”

  “People are tough to kill. It’s not like the movies, where they just fall over when you start shooting at ’em,” Yuri said seriously. “And even if we did get rid of the shitheads on that machine gun, chances are we didn’t wreck the piece. A machine gun’s not that hard to serve, and plenty of Poles know how, you bet. Same way with us and the Fritzes and everybody else who paid his dues the last time around.”

  “Right,” Vasili said in a hollow voice.

  “Come on, boys!” the lieutenant shouted from up ahead. “For Stalin and for Beria, for the true Communism ahead, we can do it! Forward!” Forward he went again. He sprayed bullets from the muzzle of his submachine gun. Even if they failed to hit anyone, they’d make the Poles keep their thick, rebellious heads down.

  Unless, of course, they didn’t. The machine gun in the smashed apartment block opened up again. The Red Army lieutenant shrieked like a damned soul. He went on shrieking, too, and howling for his mother. She wouldn’t do him any good now, but he didn’t know that.

  “Poor bastard,” Vasili said, wishing he could jam fingers into his ears.

  “Uh-huh.” Yuri dug out his pack of papirosi,
stuck a new one in his mouth, and offered them to Vasili. Vasili took one with a grunt of thanks. The lieutenant’s animal cries went on and on.

  —

  “The struggle continues!” the Red Chinese loudspeakers blared. “That capitalist maggots will be consigned to the ash heap of history, as they deserve to be and as the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dialectic demonstrates they must be!”

  Cade Curtis’ lips moved. He could repeat the propaganda record without making a single mistake—he’d heard it that often. The Chinks just wouldn’t leave it alone. Even with Stalin dead, they intended to carry on where he’d left off. The American on the record still had that harsh Midwestern accent Cade was so sick of by now.

  Lighting a Camel, he shrugged. The son of a bitch was telling lies. Whether he was telling them because he really believed them or because somebody would do something horrible to him if he didn’t, so what? Any American who could think straight would know they were lies right off the bat.

  And, evidently, not just any American. Jimmy stood up on a firing step, stuck his head over the parapet, and bellowed “Bullshit! Fucking bullshit!” at the speakers. Then he hopped down before the Red Chinese could plug him for telling the plain truth. Spotting Cade, he saluted and spoke in quieter but more earnest tones: “That number-one fucking bullshit, sir. Number-one fucking annoying bullshit, too, you betcha.”

  “It sure is.” Not for the first time, Cade wondered what to do with Jimmy after the American military bureaucracy had to notice him officially. I’ll manage something, he told himself. Jimmy might not have been lucky enough to pop out of his mother inside the US of A, but he made a better American than plenty of people who had been.

  “I hear bullshit from the Japs when they run Korea,” Jimmy said. “I hear more bullshit in Republic of Korea after last war, and in ROK Army. Chinese yell bullshit all over goddamn place now. Only guy I don’t hear bullshit from, Captain, is you.”

  Cade had saved him from the torment his own officers dished out. Like a puppy rescued from a nasty master, Jimmy rewarded his rescuer with loyalty verging on worship. Cade’s ears heated. He knew too well he had feet of clay. At the moment, he had feet of muddy clay, because rain had drenched the trenches two days earlier.

  Sighing, he said, “Jimmy, for Christ’s sake keep your head on straight. I’m full of bullshit, too. I don’t think there’s ever been anybody who ever lived who wasn’t full of it.”

  He wouldn’t have said anything like that when he came to Korea. He’d been nineteen, fresh out of ROTC, a newly minted shavetail greener than paint. He’d been eager to defend democracy, to roll back the Red invaders, and to save freedom from the inroads of tyranny.

  All he was eager for now was getting out in one piece. Kim Il-sung and Mao Tse-tung were tyrants, no doubt about it. But Syngman Rhee wasn’t much better. The war wasn’t a fight between good and evil, or even between good and better. It was between bad and worse. As long as he didn’t let his men down, that would do for him.

  “Can I ask you something else, please, Captain, sir?” Jimmy said.

  When you adopted a puppy, you had to take care of it. Cade was discovering that held even more truth when you adopted another human being. He nodded. “Sure, Jimmy. What do you want to know?”

  “This stupid goddamn fucking war ever end, what you do then?”

  That was a pretty good question, all right. Cade tried not to think about picking his life up again in the States. The USA hardly seemed real to him these days. Two years of war and six thousand miles of Pacific had washed that country right out of his hair. He didn’t think he belonged there any more. He wondered if he belonged anywhere but in a muddy or dusty trench.

  Some people honest to God didn’t. To some people, war was the best, the truest, the most exciting thing they ever found. They stayed in a fight, or longed for one, the rest of their lives. Hitler had been like that. There were others, though thank heaven they were rare birds. Cade hoped like anything he could turn back into a civilian again. He hoped he could, but he didn’t know if he could.

  “Captain? Sir?” Jimmy said.

  Cade wondered how long the wheels inside his head had been spinning without gaining any traction. Slowly, he said, “When this war started, I was at the University of Alabama, studying engineering. I wanted to learn how to make better, faster airplanes. I’d like to go back and finish my education. I don’t know if I will, but I’d like to.”

  “Engineer for airplanes!” Jimmy’s narrow eyes gleamed. “Can I do something like that, I go to America?”

  “There wouldn’t be any rules against it or anything,” Cade said. “You’d need to learn to read and write English, not just speak it.”

  “Can do some now,” Jimmy answered. “Korean has alphabet, too, you know. English not same, but I learn. But Korean all time one letter, one sound. How come English not all time one letter, one sound?”

  As far as Cade was concerned, written Korean was chicken scratches. He’d hardly noticed they were different from Chinese chicken scratches, and he’d had no idea they were built from alphabet blocks. As for English…“I don’t know why English is the way it is,” he said. “Spelling it drives everybody squirrely, not just you.”

  “Stupid fucking language,” Jimmy said without rancor.

  “Yeah, I guess maybe it is,” Cade said. “But along with learning English—no matter how stupid it is—you’re going to have to learn to do mathematics, too.”

  “You mean like counting? I can do that. I can tell you how much some number and some other number is, too, or how much if you take away.” Jimmy spoke proudly now, and well he might. Not many Korean peasants could have matched his claim.

  “That’s good. That’s great.” But Cade told him, “There’s more to math than that. Not all of it’s easy.” Trigonometry sure hadn’t seemed easy while he was slogging through it, but he’d survived and gone on to analytic geometry and calculus—which also weren’t easy. “You have to study a lot.”

  “I study, then.” Jimmy sounded very sure of himself.

  I should show him a few things, Cade thought. If you assumed an obligation, shouldn’t you fulfill it the best way you knew how? Then he laughed at himself. If Jimmy could add and subtract but could go no further, he’d need more than a few things to turn into an engineer. And where will you find the time, buddy? Cade asked himself. You’re running a regiment right now—half the time on Benzedrine. You ain’t got the hours to play math tutor, and Jimmy’d get tagged the teacher’s pet if you did.

  Every bit of that was the purest Gospel. Cade felt guilty anyhow. Wasn’t he letting Jimmy down?

  Before he came to any conclusions, three flights of Corsairs zoomed in out of nowhere. The big, beefy Navy fighters—most U.S. air power in Korea came off carrier planes these days—rocketed the Red Chinese lines and dropped napalm on them and shot them up with their heavy machine guns before roaring away. F-4Us were as obsolete as any other prop jobs. Where few jet fighters prowled, they could still bite some nasty chunks out of the enemy.

  All the same, Cade rather wished they would have stayed away. The local Chinks had been willing not to shoot if the Americans didn’t. Now they came to life with a vengeance. Machine guns spat death across no-man’s-land. Mortar bombs started whistling in. The GIs fired back. Things probably wouldn’t settle down again for days.

  And the stupid flyboys hadn’t knocked out the enemy’s loudspeakers. If dialectical materialism at top volume wasn’t a fate worse than death, Cade hadn’t the slightest idea what possibly could be.

  ARNSBERG WAS A NO-ACCOUNT TOWN if ever there was one, at least in Rolf Mehlen’s imperfectly objective opinion. Why the Red Army wanted to hang on to it tooth and toenail made no sense to him. Odds were most of the Ivans hunkered down against artillery and armor had no idea, either. Their superiors had told them to do it. Somebody from their own side would shoot them if they tried to run away. So they stayed and fought.

  Rolf’s unit was at the sharp end of the
spear. The Americans running the campaign against Russia weren’t sorry to spend German lives instead of their own. No doubt they called it a good investment. They think like Jews, went through Rolf’s mind. You could take the old Frontschwein out of the Waffen-SS. Taking the SS out of the old Frontschwein was harder.

  Not even fifty meters separated Rolf from the Slavic Untermenschen. Several of them had those damned assault rifles that would shred anything out to four hundred meters. His Springfield didn’t seem like much beside them. They would have shredded him if not for the battered stone fence he crouched behind.

  The Americans figured he was expendable. He didn’t like the idea so much himself. Not showing a centimeter of skin, he shouted, “Hey, you Russian shitheads? You understand German?”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’, Fritz!” an Ivan yelled back. He repeated the endearment in fair Deutsch in case Rolf couldn’t follow the original.

  But Rolf could. He swore fluently in Russian, and knew some basic battlefield commands, too—Hands up! and the like. But he didn’t really speak the language. He kept on in German: “You clowns should give it up. What’s the point of going on now that the Scheissekopf who gave you your marching orders has gone and bought a plot?”

  “You sure sound like a Fritz,” the German-speaking Russian answered. “Hitler blew out his own brains, and the rest of you pussies couldn’t screech ‘Kamerad!’ fast enough.”

  That held just enough truth to sting. The Reich had lasted only a little more than a week after Hitler died. Rolf still wanted to believe Hitler’d perished fighting to the last, as German radio claimed at the time. The evidence was against him. He wanted to believe it even so.